Lack of working-class Labour MPs has 'alienated voters'

The sharp decline in the number of working-class Labour MPs has caused a slump in support among voters with similar backgrounds, according to research that seeks to explain why support has dwindled in the party’s heartlands.

The study says previous leaders such as Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair made a concerted effort to select “more and more middle-class candidates to run for office during the 1980s and 1990s as part of an effort to rebrand,” resulting in success at the ballot box.

But it claims that the “conscious electoral strategy” stored up intractable problems for Labour, as working-class voters, who initially simply didn’t vote in response, are now seeking an alternative.

“Working-class people are much more likely than middle-class people to vote Labour when the party contains a substantial number of working-class MPs, and variation over time in the number of working-class Labour MPs closely tracks the strength of such class voting,” wrote Oliver Heath, an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, who wrote the paper.

He said the study, which is revealed in a new book, More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box, showed that even when other factors were controlled the number of MPs from poorer backgrounds had an effect.

The fact that 37% of Labour MPs came from a manual occupational background in 1964 but just 7% did in 2015 had harmed the party’s image among its traditional voters, he added.

“What the research showed was that as Labour candidates became more middle class, many working-class people simply stopped voting. For the last 20 or 30 years we have had a picture of gradually growing working-class abstention,” he said, arguing that people felt Labour was no longer representing them.

“They became alienated from the political process – and that went unnoticed for quite some time. But these alienated voters are fertile territory for being remobilised,” he added, saying that is why they were drawn to Ukip and then – more clearly – the vote for Brexit.

“It is very difficult for Labour to rebuild the connection in a credible way. The party needs to reassess what its social identity is – who it wants to represent: the disaffected working-class voters in the north or the more liberal middle classes. I think it was easier when it had a strong identity at the core.”

Heath said the original shift away from poorer candidates was started by Kinnock as part of an effort to break links with the unions, and disassociate with working-class radicalism.

His research found that the problem was most acute with wealthy candidates, finding that they tended to “particularly repel” the working classes, because they were not seen as approachable.

“MPs from privileged backgrounds are indeed perceived as less ‘in touch’ by working-class voters, who will regard a pledge to stand up for the underprivileged as more credible coming from someone whose own background is modest than a similar promise coming from the child of millionaires,” he wrote in the report.

Heath called for action, arguing that political parties had rightly tried hard to increase the representation of women, ethnic minorities and young people in Westminster. “But the representation of those groups has been growing over time, while the representation of working-class MPs has been falling,” he said.

Jonathan Ashworth, a shadow cabinet member who represents Leicester South, said: “This is a problem for politics across the piste, but the Labour party needs to increase its efforts to find candidates who come from the communities we want to represent. That is more working-class, female and more black and ethnic minority candidates.”

But the MP said it was a more complicated issue than was sometimes made out, with MPs like himself or Gloria De Piero, who were brought up in working-class families, but ended up in typically middle-class jobs.

“My mum was a barmaid in Manchester nightclubs, and my dad a croupier in a Salford casino. We were working-class but I went to university and beat the socioeconomic indicators and ended up working for Gordon Brown and becoming an MP. So where do I fall in these statistics?”